European Films

Le petit lieutenant (The Young Lieutenant), an unusually normal policier noir from French director Xavier Beauvois, turns out to be a ravishing character study of a small Parisian police station and the team that works there. With the added weight of the recent riots in and around the French capital (something which could of course not have been foreseen by the filmmakers during production), this investigation into why and how people want to work in law enforcement is a timely and well-acted film about what drives those who try to keep society in check.

 

Jalil Lespert (the journalist from Le promeneur du Champ de Mars) is Antoine Derouère, a young recruit from the Atlantic coast who chooses to be stationed in Paris despite the fact that his wife has no intentions to give up her job and move to Paris with him. Antoine has chosen the Parisian judiciary police because he wants some action; at home there would be one dead man a year if he’s lucky; in Paris he hopes to get several a week. He is a newcomer to the small department like his boss, Caroline Vaudieu (Nathalie Baye), in a way, who had to leave the police force several years ago because of an alcohol problem but is clean now. They bond  immediately over something invisible; perhaps because they are new, or because their private lives are not without problems.

 

Beauvois, who not only stars as one of Caroline and Antoine's colleagues but also co-wrote the screenplay with Guillaume Breaud and Jean-Eric Troubat, shows the department handling a case involving clochards, illegal immigrants and shady Russian Mafiosi, but it is clear from the outset that they are not really interested in the criminal case; a whodunit this is not. The big idea of this film is that it has no big ideas at all: it just shows life like it could happen (and probably is happening) around us.

 

Antoine, Caroline and their handful of colleagues at the department all try to get by; they enforce the law for a living, but that does not make them infallible human beings. One of the characters is asked why he wanted to join the police: “Films, actually,” he says, “At least in the beginning. They made it look so exciting.” Obviously he has not grown up watching films like the one he is in: here Antoine needs to throw up during an autopsy (of which the wretchedness is conveyed cunningly through sound effects rather than visuals) and most of the police officers have more trouble at home than at work.     

 

The conceit that makes Le petit lieutenant work is that its unspectacular approach of police work (especially noticeable in a rather matter-of-fact shoot-out that is expressly filmed without any excitement) adequately shifts the audience’s interest from the police procedures to the people applying them. Strong acting across the board help this film sustain its emotional momentum without any clear thematic symbolism, even if it does get a little heavy-handed when Beauvois tries to juxtapose a baptism and a death in real-time. In the end, Le petit lieutenant is a film about normal people doing a difficult and mostly unspectacular job and the same adjectives could be applied to the film itself. But difficult, unspectacular and – above all – normal can be nice too sometimes.

 

 

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